Conservatives are reeling once again as GOP Representative Mike Johnson, the newly chosen House Speaker from Louisiana, is rolling over for the Democrats and their latest bloated and dangerously misallocated spending scam. Upon being chosen Speaker, Johnson promised real change in Washington. Yet it seems that no matter who holds the majority in the Congress, and who is in “leadership,” leftist Democrats remain thoroughly in control of the budget, which means they are ultimately in control of the entire process.
Going back several decades, it has just been presumed that “nothing can be done” to stop the out of control spending, or to achieve even the slightest degree of accountability with the Nation’s purse strings. Democrats won’t have any of it, and even sincerely Conservative Republican Senators and Representatives, regardless of their numbers in the Congress, have been shell shocked into believing they are helpless in making any genuine, substantive inroads on D.C. “Business As Usual.” Of course RINOs are fine with this abysmal status quo since it gives their pro-leftist/Globalist treachery a mantle of cover.
But how did we come to this detestable place, and what, if anything, can be done about it? The answer requires revisiting the Clinton years, and the disastrous 1995 “Budget Deal,” which set the stage for every ensuing fiscal blowout ever since. Yet if properly analyzed (and that means ignoring all history revision from Fake News and the Democrats), Americans would find they actually have a blueprint for fighting this fight and restoring fiscal sanity to the thoroughly corrupt Washington Swamp.
In December of 1995, efforts by the Republican dominated Congress and Senate to rein in Bill Clinton’s budget had completely stalled. Clinton had deliberately bloated it as an ugly political calculation and a foray into socialism, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R.-KS) initially appeared to be standing firm in his commitment to put the brakes on Clinton’s unchecked national lurch to the left. Then the Clinton machine and its media lackeys went into overdrive, hysterically predicting every form of financial hardship and disaster to befall Americans, coast to coast, unless Dole relented.
Some leftist media efforts exceeded the ridiculous, engaging in shameless fear mongering amid crocodile tears that Americans would be thrown out onto the streets when their Social Security checks failed to arrive. One Fake News report wailed that the horse-drawn sleigh concession at Yellowstone would face total ruin, as if it was a bell-weather of livelihoods across America.
After all of eighteen days, Bob Dole issued his January 2, 1996 “Enough is enough” concession, ceding the battle to Clinton and his rape of the American treasury. Almost every subsequent budget battle has followed a nearly identical pattern, the only variation being that Republicans most often cave much more quickly now.
Enjoying this leverage, Democrats happily allow budgets to lapse unless they get every single item they demand, knowing that they can blame Republicans for any bumps in the road, however brief. Worst of all, so many turncoats in the GOP, acting out of fear of Fake News and Democrat castigation, will instantly point fingers of blame at any Republican who dares keep campaign promises regarding fiscal responsibility.
A classic example of this was 2013, when Democrat Senate leader Harry Reid of Nevada allowed the clock to run out, and the government to “shut down,” while blaming Senator Ted Cruz (R.-TX) for refusing to roll over for the impending nightmare of Obamacare. Predictably, Reid was able to count on Senate Minority “Leader” Mitch McConnell to do his dirty work, along with Speaker John Boehner, both of whom were quick to duck fire by berating Senator Cruz with an eagerness and zeal they somehow could never muster towards any Democrat.
Here again, phony leftist Democrat outrage to cow and intimidate Republicans exceeded the absurd. Claiming the government to be broke, Barack Obama actually expended extra money to erect fences around WWII, Korea, and Vietnam War memorials, intending to create a “hardship” for Veterans, a typically conservative constituency, to inflame anger against Republicans by preventing them access.
Rather than standing firmly on principle, and fighting to uphold the real, Constitutional responsibility to establish a proper, working budget, Republicans are now content to descend to such cowardly and absurd inventions as those “continuing resolutions,” by which they hope to avoid criticism from leftist Democrats and their Fake News minions. In the process, they abdicate their responsibility to the American people.
However, such a scenario is hardly an inevitability. Revisiting Dole’s 1996 capitulation, the ultimate irony was barely mentioned then, and has been thoroughly buried since. On the very day that Dole dropped the ball, polling data for Clinton was the lowest of his entire first term. Yet in the immediate aftermath of Dole’s moral and ideological surrender, the numbers completely flipped. Clinton was suddenly deemed the “principled statesmen,” with Dole and the Republicans cast as posturing politicians. Worst of all, it was by Dole’s own words that such a contention could be validated.
Clinton was on the verge of backing down. And had he done so, Dole and the Republicans could have been thoroughly vindicated, despite all the Democrat and Fake News squalling. The “elephant in the room” that is dutifully ignored is that accepting the blame, even on a totally false premise, ultimately “validates” it. That’s what Dole accomplished, to the benefit the Democrats, with his “Enough is enough” surrender.
Despite Democrat and Fake News caterwauling to the contrary, it is clearly not the side deemed to have “caused” the shutdown that gets the blame. Rather, it is the side that capitulates. In the end, the losers accomplish nothing, and could have avoided the entire controversy, had they merely played along from the beginning. This is the huge, dirty secret that his been staring America in the face, but which the left still works feverishly to cloud.
In January of 2018, President Trump actually succeeded in exposing the lie. Rather than falling into the standard cower/appease trap, he loudly and properly labeled that budget impasse the “Schumer Shutdown,” at which point the Democrats were forced to back down. It is altogether unfortunate that the toxic combination of cowardice and GOP “Establishment” duplicity means that unlike President Trump, many will seek to continue their despicable “Business as usual” and are all too willing to go along to get along, at the ultimate expense of the American people, their livelihoods, and the security of the Nation’s border.
Ultimately, the dirty D.C. status quo can be changed, but only when real Conservatives inhabit the Halls of Congress and are willing to brave the firestorm, in order to fight for what is in the best interests of the American people.
